I’m thinking of making some food at E1 for a House celebration night and I was wondering what people would recommend making.
Preferably as simple but fulfilling as possible as this will be my first time cooking at Anvil.
Yes we have a usable firepit.

I’ve seen a few posts about food on here but they seem to be either about the bare necessities or about IC cooking. I thought it would be interesting to write a topic that goes walks through building up the basics to become something more interesting.
Part 1: Cold food
The basics:
I will start off with cold food. Sometimes, you don’t have time or the equipment to cook and you have to go with things you can just eat. Fruit and nuts are great things to have just to snack on. You have to be care…

Here you go. If it doesn’t help you then I’ll try and give some more advice here.

We’re League, but we’ve eaten pasta and sauce a few times. Quite easy to do IC if you can get your water to boil. You may need to camouflage your bag of pasta and source of the sauce, but that can be as easy as decanting each ingredient into IC containers in your tent before bringing it out. As a healer, I will often have a variety of herbs on me.

If you have the patience, I can see a spit-roast making you many meat-eating friends and veggie enemies among those camping downwind.

On the rare occasions I do, I pre-cook batches at home, freeze, and then reheat over the fire. Usually stews and chillis for one-pot simplicity. It means you can be 100% sure it’s cooked through and you don’t have to faff.

Pre-prep as much as possible. Aim for re-heating in a field rather than cooking from scratch. The bigger the frozen lump the longer it takes to re-heat, so if prepping in advance freeze in smaller portions and add a bit to your pot at a time.

One big hot dish (soups, stews, and all variations of tasty-something-in-sauce - curries, chilli, tagine) + a carbohydrate (bread, couscous, pasta) + salad + side dishes/relishes makes an impressive spread. I find it’s is definitely worth spending a little bit more on proper crusty bread rather than burger rolls or similar. If you can manage some cake/fruit/sweets (candied fruit, chocolate etc) for afters it also looks impressive to be able to set out a second course.

What nation are you in, and what dietary requirements do you have in your group (vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, allergies etc)?

Pre cooked and frozen stews and soups are great. Last well in cool bags and can be decanted straight into pots with about a 1/3rd again of water (freezing removes some water and if frozen still the water will stop it from burning).

While I usually make more complicated things (i.e literally bread), a great simple one a friend made over the fire pit was just salmon in tinfoil. Grill it in butter and lemon, and you really can’t go wrong! If you got a neat tilly can or something just as sturdy and simple, you can boil up some veg easily over the pit also to go along side it.